To be fair, Peterson has now written extensively about “Brother Guymen” a ‘brother’ who worked for Peterson for a decade and who Peterson never bothered to go out of his way to meet.
Start with hyperbole, check.Sigh. I’ve apparently never done a decent thing in my life, nor had a kind or a good thought.
Well no, not really about “Brother Guymen”. It’s more personal martyr syndrome rather than anything about “Brother Guymen”. Who was, after all compensated in some way for what he did for Interpreter, and did receive invites to Interpreter get togethers. So there! What the hell was Peterson supposed to do - go out of his way to meet an insignificant nobody as far as Peterson was concerned?My statement, yesterday, that I never met Tim Guymon, the long-time typesetter for Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship who recently passed away, was instantly seized upon at the Peterson Obsession Board as proof that I’m willing to exploit “the little people” but that I otherwise disdain them and refuse to mix with them.
After all, I’ve visited Florida innumerable times (presumably with all of my travel and lodging and dining expenses covered by the Interpreter Foundation) while poor Brother Guymon slaved for us, year after year, without any compensation and with no expense account. Yet, even so, I couldn’t be bothered to grace him with My Presence even when I was right there with him in Florida, practically in his front yard. Heck, chimes in one eager chorister, we never even invited him to join our annual birthday party in Utah.
Actually, Brother Guymon worked as Interpreter’s typesetter on a contract basis, and he was paid for his efforts — one of our very few paid workers. And he was invited to our birthday party every single year, without fail, even though he lived somewhere near Pensacola, at the western end of the Florida panhandle and, thus, nearly nineteen hundred miles away.
My wife and I visited Florida multiple times because a Second-Generation Unit, a Legally-Recognized Second-Generation Unit, and a Third-Generation Unit lived in Orlando at the time. (Their names have been redacted to shield them from the tender mercies of the Obsession Board, and, anyway, they’ve since moved from the state.) My wife and I paid for those visits to Florida every single time; no Interpreter monies were used for either our transportation, our food, or our lodging. (I believe that such family visits are still considered ethically permissible by most people, perhaps even if they involve me.)
Florida is a large state. Orlando, where my family members lived, is slightly more than 450 miles from Pensacola, near which Brother Guymon lived. I have never visited Pensacola. Brother Guymon wasn’t the only person in the Pensacola area whom I haven’t met.
Note: An additional accusation has now been appended to those above. Allen Wyatt, who had had by far the longest and most direct interaction with Tim Guymon of any of us at Interpreter, went down to visit Brother Guymon when the latter’s health began to fail. According to the Obsession Board, Allen did so at the expense of Interpreter Foundation donors. However, the demonstrable fact is that no Interpreter funds were used to pay for any portion of Allen’s trip — which probably means, then (and, here, I’m offering my own suggestions, though employing the Obsession Board’s typically rigorous standards of evidence), that Allen’s compensation must have been routed through clandestine Interpreter payments to a Mexican drug cartel, or ISIS, or, my personal favorite, The Syndicate. (For enjoyable documentary evidence regarding The Syndicate, see Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation [2015] and Mission: Impossible – Fallout [2018].]
Even after more than twenty years of this kind of nonsense, the malevolent fantasies of the Obsession Board still sometimes astonish me. The hatred slumbers not, nor sleeps.
But no Tom, still not a word of thanks for a ten year volunteer (who had some spare change chucked at him from afar) who died recently. I’m now wondering just how many long standing volunteers there are at Interpreter that Peterson has never met? The dilemma Peterson now has, is that were he to correct this horrible misstep and write something nice about Brother Guymen, he’ll be seen to have forced to do so by this board rather than because it was the right thing for the President of the Interpreter Foundation to do so. Brother Guymen will remain just an underling whom Peterson “never met” in the decade or more that Guymen slaved away for him.
